The opening word of today's verse,
evam, mirrors the evam in the last pāda of yesterday's verse, the
translation of which I shall change, for the sake of conformity, to
“Even as it witnesses it so before its very eyes.”

Evaṁ gate means “It being so,”
and at the same time it might mean “you being so.” Evaṁ gata
might be intended to point, in other words, to one or more of the
several possible meanings of tathā-gata, “one who has arrived
thus,” “one who has gone thus,” “one from whom [faults] are
gone,” “one in whom absence is thus,” “one who has arrived
at the state like this,” “one who has arrived at reality,” and
so on. Expressed thus in the words "[you] being so," Aśvaghoṣa's intention might be to
remind an independently-minded individual who is endeavouring to make
the Buddha's teachings his own, that the ultimate aim is not so much
to drive one's own chariot as to let one's own chariot be driven
by... by what? Maybe by evaṁ gate, one who is such, or it which is
so.

If we track back to earlier on in the
canto to where the driver is introduced, there is some evidence to
suggest that Aśvaghoṣa was portraying the charioteer as one who was such,
i.e, one grown old, a mature man. The primary evidence is in the
word aklība, which I translated as assertive (contrasting the
assertive driver to the submissive horses), but which originally
means “not emasculated” or “not lacking in testicles” i.e. complete:

Yoked to four calm submissive
horses bearing golden trappings, / With an assertive driver at the
reins, a complete man of knowledge and integrity
(aklība-vidvac-chuci-raśmi-dhāram), was the golden carriage which
he then ascended. // SN3.8 //

In the 2nd pāda the prince asks to be
taken home quickly or rapidly (śīghram). Evidently something has
changed. Before the prince was progressing away from the palace in a
dignified manner, slowly and gradually (śanaiḥ śanaiḥ; 3.10),
while the women rushed around on all sides barging about. Now it is the prince who is in a rush. It seems to raise the question of
exactly what establishment of the bodhi-mind is – a change for the
better or a change for the worse? Are the prince's original features now beginning to emerge? Or is the prince, on the contrary, losing his original mind?

In theory, no doubt, establishment of
the bodhi-mind is something to celebrate -- light a candle, burn a stick of incense, and whisper a prayer of thanks to buddhas of the pure land. But Aśvaghoṣa's writing
forces us to be ever alert, if we weren't already, to the irony which
resides in the gap between Buddhist theory and the actual process of
a bloke who sits.

This being so, an irony that Aśvaghoṣa
may have in mind in the 2nd and 3rd pādas is
that this change that has taken place in the prince's body and mind
is now taking the prince in a direction which is opposite to the
direction that the Buddha will later follow and recommend others to
follow. The prince wishes to go home, eschewing pleasure in parkland,
whereas the Buddha will leave home and practice pleasant practices in
parklands and gardens like the famous park called Jetavana, “Jetri's Wood,” where the Buddha is said to have passed 19 out of
the 45 rains retreats between his enlightenment and his death.

Ostensibly the prince's establishment
of the bodhi-mind is being described as it is conventionally
understood, as something that grew out of the Buddha's recognition of
universal suffering. But I have long had my own doubts about this
conception, stemming particularly from an encounter with a so-called
monk with a 3rd-world money-seeking mentality who I met in Thailand
in 1988. This individual in a yellow-red robe approached me wanting
to know what had brought me to Buddhism, what experience of suffering
I had had. My strong intuition was that he did not give a monkey's
willie what had brought me to Buddhism; he just wanted to make a
connection that might be materially useful for him. Furthermore, from
my side, I was not aware that my original optimistic desire to grasp
Zen enlightenment had got anything to do with suffering. His mental conception of what "establishing the bodhi-mind" was, gleaned from listening to Buddhists, did not tally at all with my own actual experience.

EH Johnston evidently bought the
ostensible meaning so completely that he felt justified in amending
the old Nepalese manuscript's jarā-bhave to jarā-bhaye, which he
translated as “the fear of old age” – hence, “For how can I
take my pleasure in the garden, when the fear of old age rules in my
mind?”

The original jarā-bhave is a more
challenging term to translate. If we take bhava to mean “becoming,”
jarā-bhava simply means “growing old.” If we take bhava to mean
“arising from,” jarā-bhava means “arising from growing old”
(hence EBC: “the thoughts arising from old age”). If we take
bhava to mean “well-being, excellence (= śreyas),” then
jarā-bhava means something very different indeed from the ostensible
meaning, along the lines of “the excellence of growing old” or
“the better state of being which is growing old.” In the end I
have taken jarā-bhava as equivalent to jara-bhāva, “the reality
of growing old.”

Whichever one of these meanings is
taken, jarā-bhava as I read it does not express aging as a terror;
again, as in previous verses, it expresses growing old as the
culmination of a process of human development.

For the prince, however, “growing
old” as thus understood -- as the long-term effect of following a
better way, or as a reality – is not anything he himself has
experienced first hand. Even if he calls it a reality, it is not yet
for him a reality; it is only a concept – just as Zen enlightenment
was only a concept for me when I set off for Japan 30 years ago (and
so Zen enlightenment has remained, I might add, though I have picked
up one or clues along the way about Zen delusion).

In conclusion, then, if we understand
jarā-bhava to express growing old as a mature state, the prince is
very far from being in that state (though the driver of the chariot
might be in it). The immature mind of the prince is occupied with
growing old as an end, whereas the mind of one who has grown truly
old – having gone like this (evaṁ gate) – might be more
occupied with attending afresh to a means in the present moment, like
a charioteer holding his horses.

VOCABULARY

evam: ind. thus , in this way , in such
a manner , such ; in classical Sanskrit evam occurs very frequently
, especially in connection with the roots vac , " to speak "
, and śru , " to hear " , and refers to what precedes as
well as to what follows [e.g. evam uktvā , having so said ; evam
evai*tat , this is so ; evam astuorevam bhavatu , be it so , I assent
; asty evam , it is so ; yady evam , if this be so ; kim evam , how
so? what is the meaning of it? what does this refer to? mai*vam , not
so! evam - yathā or yathā - evam , so - as])

gate (loc. sg.): come to , approached ,
arrived at , being in , situated in ; gone to any state or condition